


Look Inside, Girl

by Raisintorte



Category: The 4400
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2007-12-17
Updated: 2007-12-17
Packaged: 2018-01-25 05:06:30
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,346
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/1633091
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Raisintorte/pseuds/Raisintorte
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Diana had more questions than she would ever be able to answer.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Look Inside, Girl

**Author's Note:**

> Much thanks to thepouncer and daisycm83 for betaing.
> 
> Written for Sadie Flood

 

 

Diana didn't like to think about what her life would be like if a big ball of light hadn't returned 4400 missing people back in 2004, but sometimes it was hard to avoid.

She already knew how empty her life would be without Maia in it. No matter how hard Diana tried to forget that terrible experience, it lurked in the back of her mind, nagging at her with what-ifs. What if it happened again, what if this time there was no trace of Maia whatsoever? What if Diana didn't even realize she was missing the best thing that ever happened to her?

Before she lost her self in the what-ifs, she'd have to take a deep breath and push the contingencies away.

Then again, as much as she loved Maia and knew how bad life would be without her - when Diana got to thinking about a world with 4400, she wondered what it would be like if she wasn't fighting a constant battle with ever changing sides. NTAC, her team, would figure out one angle, finally understood that one thing and three more mysteries popped up to take its place.

She was always on, never off. Always an NTAC agent dealing with weirdness that blew pre-4400 rationality out of the water. Even when she tried to get away from it all by moving, by pursuing romance and delight, Diana got pulled back in. She could try to blame April, for screwing up and luring her back, sucking her back into that life, but that wouldn't be honest. Diana choose to stay.

Leaving Ben in Spain had probably been a mistake, but she couldn't guarantee that staying would have kept either her or Maia content or safe. Life didn't come with a happiness guarantee and while it was more probable than not that they would have been happy with Ben, Diana was compelled to go back to Seattle. She needed to get back in the fray. She couldn't sit idly by while others shaped the future.

Even if returning to Seattle meant Maia was in close proximity to Jordan Collier and Promise City. Diana firmly believed that it was healthy for Maia to be around others with abilities, but she didn't want it to be on Jordan Collier's terms, in a place he ruled.

The future was so unsure. And Diana had more questions than she would ever be able to answer.

Was her team doing the right things, taking the right steps, making the right decisions? Were they saving the future? There had been so many changes in NTAC command since the 4400 appeared - Ryland, Nina, and finally Meghan. And so many changes in the mission. They went from following ripples to essentially fighting a super powered war on drugs. Through it all, Diana knew she could always rely on Tom. The incident with the Marked had shaken her confidence, planted seeds of doubt, but now Tom was Tom again and they could go back to trying to make sense of this crazy world.

Jordan used to say that "the war for the future will be fought in the past," and Diana was on the front lines of that approaching war, whatever form it took. Her team was spread so thin trying to hold it all together: helping Shawn achieve his goals with the Center, taking down the Marked, investigating Collier's intentions with Promise City, and fighting the effects of widespread Promicin use. The line between right and wrong kept slipping and every time someone on her "side" aligned with Jordan she felt as if her "side" was sliding further away from where it had all begun.

Protecting Maia from all these strange developments was always first and foremost in Diana's mind. She didn't want Maia to get hurt - Diana wanted to protect whatever was left of Maia's innocence and childhood. She knew it was naive, but she had to at least try. By virtue of Maia's ability and her gifts she would always be involved with this struggle whether or not it was Maia's own choice.

Diana had tried to protect her daughter, shield her from all things 4400, and keep her away from Promise City. But the more Diana tried, the more Maia rebelled, running to Collier and his band of merry men. Diana wished it could be different and she could let Maia choose her path, her side - but no matter how much she had seen and had to endure, Maia was still a child. Diana's child.

Sometimes she resented the future for putting the burden of saving humanity on their shoulders. For making it their responsibility to clean up the mess. Granted, the choices she and her contemporaries made on a daily basis probably had a hand in creating that mess, but she still resented the future sacrificing her present to fight their battle.

She would get so angry, and then, just when she had worked herself up into a full boil, she would remember that if the future hadn't messed with time and tried to fix everything, they never would have sent the 4400 back. And she never would have met Maia. Which would loop Diana back to trying not to think about how empty her life would be if she had never adopted Maia.

If she had been in the future, would she have been able to sacrifice innocents on the pyre of supposed destiny - to wage a proxy war in the past, against shadowy foes. She knew it couldn't have been an easy decision for the people who made it - at least she hoped it hadn't been easy and the future hadn't decided to mess with time on a whim. Diana liked to think she would discover a way to fix whatever was wrong in her own time and not mess with previous generation's lives like they did. But if faced with destruction and who knew what else in that time, and given the option of manipulating time and space and people to fix it? She would choose to do so.

One night Diana and Marco had sat around discussing the temporal mechanics of it all. Was this the first time people had been snatched from their present and sent to the future? When they had pulled Maia and those other children from the 21st century for the second time and sent them back in time, it didn't make the history books. The children made changes, but there was no evidence anyone had suspected the children had come from another time - so what's to say it hadn't happened on other occasions? Sending 4400 people back at once seemed like a desperate move, a last ditch effort to save them all by disrupting the entire globe with shock. But what if either faction of the future had been quietly picking people out of one time and putting them in another for years with no one the wiser? What if things had changed in ways no one could, or ever would know about?

She and Marco only had that discussion once because it had raised so many questions and she already had more than she could ever answer. Diana had to live in the here and now. Fight the battles before her, solve the problems she was given one at a time, and hope she was doing what was best and what was right. She had to hope that when it all went down in the end that she was on the right side, and the future she was working so damn hard and sacrificing so much to build was a place she would want to live. A place Maia could raise her children and her children's children.

Because when it all came down to it she might have started this assignment with different motives, but now she was fighting for Maia's future.

No, Diana didn't like to think what life would be like if the 4400 hadn't happened, because along with the bad and the craziness, came Maia. And she couldn't imagine life without her.

She didn't want to.

 

 

 


End file.
